Bought iMac 3 yrs ago and have had performance issues ever since. Support says it is not hardware issue and to contact 3rd party apps (MS Office and Adobe). Anyone else with this type of issue?

Hello, Cooljules98591.

Maybe we can help figure out what’s going on with your Mac.  It could be anything from a simple software conflict to a hardware failure. Some things are fairly easy to fix.

You should start with an EtreCheck evaluation of your Mac.

EtreCheck is a diagnostic app that gathers and reports important debugging information about your Macintosh. It is very highly regarded and meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help others help you troubleshoot and resolve your Mac problems.

Please navigate to EtreCheck.com and download the free version of EtreCheck. Once you’ve run the app and created your report please post it with your reply to this message. 

You must upload the full report. For instructions on how to attach your EtreCheck report to your reply, please click  How to use Add Text when posting…

We can use the EtreCheck report to look for the more obvious things that may be causing your problem and advise how to correct them.

Notes:

• Clean up. Follow the EtreCheck prompts to remove orphan files.

Other than that, the reason your iMac is very slow is due to the 5400 rpm hard drive. Very slow. If you use an external SSD and run macOS from that, it will make your Mac 10 to 80 times faster for storage, depending on what external SSD you buy. For more info, instructions, and what external SSD to buy, please read: How to Setup and Use an External SSD as y… - Apple Community.

-Jack

Notes for Stuseg:

• No Backup
• ParagonNTFS should not be used, ideally.

However, the reason your iMac is very slow is due to the 5400 rpm hard drive. Very slow. If you use an external SSD and run macOS from that, it will make your Mac 10 to 80 times faster for storage, depending on what external SSD you buy. For more info, instructions, and what external SSD to buy, please read: How to Setup and Use an External SSD as y… - Apple Community.

Also, in the future, please start a new thread instead "hijacking" this one. :-)

-Jack

Hey CoolJ,

I've got a 2017 iMac as well and this has been a slug since I bought it. Even now it's typing slowly. I've downloaded etrecheck and got the report below but all it says is that I haven't set up time capsule...Really? I'm ready to throw it off a bridge so please help me.

Thx

Stu

[Edited by Moderator]

Unfortunately, you purchased the slowest iMac Apple offered at the time of purchase: 8 GB of RAM and a 5400 rpm hard drive. It is the most basic model intended for the basic uses, email, web surfing, etc. It's not designed for the heavy use you're putting it through.

Also you've not rebooted in 21 days. One should reboot more frequently, like every other day, as that clears out temporary system and application cache and swap files. This is known to aid in the performance and memory usage.

You can't do anything about the RAM but you an improve boot time, app and file opening, closing and saving time with an external SSD that's been cloned from your internal boot drive and running from it. Your current read and write speeds are:

Write speed: 72 MB/s

 Read speed: 58 MB/s

With an external SSD like the Envoy Pro EX with USB-C or USB 3 from OWC (MacSales.com) you can get read and write speed in the order of:

Write Speed: 375 MB/s

Read Speed: 400 MB/s

Possibly more with their newer lines. If you decide to go that route contact OWC customer support to find out which model would be most suitable for your particular iMac.

I'm just a very satisfied user of their products (currently have 7 of their SSDs in service).

Hello, Stuseg.

Sorry to know you're having an issue with your 2017 iMac.

Rather than hijack this thread, please post your issue and the EtreCheck report in a new posting so that it can get the proper attention that it deserves.

d.i.

Since your iMac is a 2017 model, you do have two Thunderbolt 3 ports.

-Jack